Again not trying to swap your choice, building your own is great but I just find that I end up spending soooo much time tinkering I now look for more off the shelf solutions. Have you considered a Dell T20. There is currently a cashback offer for one at servers direct, 180 after cash back with a E3 Xeon. Comes with 4GB and a 1 TB HD too I think.
btw what gen microserver do you have. I have both a NL54 and a G8 neither I would consider loud, but then again I do have a dedicated room for them.
Just to update on the drives, it turns out that there is another option, the WD80EZZX. Now, as far as i can tell from testing, this is a HGST He8, but running at 5400rpm - & it's explicitly showing as being a HGST drive in a variety of things... ...whereas my other WD ones are showing as WD. So, what now appears to be the case is that a few early ones got the full fledge 7200 He8, the next lot got the slower 5400 He8 that i've got (which are marginally quicker than the Reds from what i can tell), whilst the newest ones produced have the standard WD80EFZX Reds. There does seem to be a suggestion that the ones i have don't have TLDR enabled - though apparently this can be turned on... ...but i'll need to have a look at that after some sleep. That said, as they're not going to be used in arrays then it shouldn't matter for my usage (the Greens have been as happy as the Reds on my lsi card - touch wood), but it's a possible consideration for other people.
I have been thinking of getting some for bud would feel better is TLER was turned on, let me know how you get on with that one! Might end up being an expensive shopping weekend!
wow posts.. so.. Already got the R4 case (from here a few months ago) so don't really want to get another case just for disks. The plan would be to fill it with 4 new disks (4,5,6,8TB.. depending on cost) and 2 of the old 2TB ones from microserver - leaving some space for expansion.. but this should do for a few years and by then hopefully we'll have 10TB disks that i can just copy over the data to! Not sure what gen the microserver is.. probably about 5 years old? It's quite loud, not super loud, but annoying enough when it's on hence I'd prefer to get rid of it. Happy to change from Intel to AMD - I literally went through partpicker with that CPU and picked a cheapish motherboard to pair it with - if there's an AMD set up that has about the same heat output but cheaper I'm happy to go with that! Cooler wise - went for big as it means it'll cool it quieter - if there's something cheaper that'll be as quiet then happy to change to that too! RAM wise - went for that much (don't really care what brand it is) as it'll be a fileserver, and RAM in fileservers is useful! As an aside - I had 32 Green disks in arrays at work, and 32 Blacks in arrays at work... the greens failed faaaaaaaar more than the blacks under similar work loads (the old 2TB EARS greends, and 2TB WD Black REs) -- maybe they've got a load better now?? think that's everything?
i was on my way to bed when i posted so seem to have given slightly the wrong impression... What i was meaning was that i'd look into the subject further - not that i'd necessarily bother doing it at the minute myself... Well, it's only really with drives in arrays that TLER (not TLDR obviously) matters - but what appeared to be the case is that it's the same process that worked on the early Greens. What is the case is that, with the right s/w, you can see what drive is used before shelling; & so 'could' return if you didn't get the drive you wanted. i know that Stablebit Scanner works... ...but i only used that as i've bought into DrivePool as a better method for amalgamating drives & there are other things out there. ignoring the possibility of good or bad batches, applying differing setups & workloads isn't necessarily valid. Firstly, with the lack of TLER in Greens & the potential for them to drop out, this is about drives in h/w arrays - & as you're saying that you're going to be using a s/w array & with me not using them in arrays at all then it's not exactly relevant. You're then looking at creating, what appears to be to a large extent, static storage (as most of mine is) with a low number of drives, a low access rate & a max of perhaps 2 or 3 processes trying to run simultaneously on any one drive - as opposed to, say, a very high random r/w rate (+ the associated increase in background processes like defragging) or 10s or 100s of users potentially accessing the data... ...& so, unless the drives either of us used for this type of storage were inherently faulty (like the 7200.11s largely were), we would expect any drive that we used to last for much longer than if it were put within that company's servers. Now, obviously i don't doubt that the Blacks are, in general, much more robust than the Greens, however it's always about finding a balance that suits the usage, workload, cost & the value of the data... That's not saying that i'd necessarily suggest using nothing but Greens - so every Green i have (bar a 4TB that i use as a portable in a dock) is a backup drive for data on a Red or Yellow - however that's just how i've chosen to do things to balance cost rather than a recommendation.
so excluding disks - does the CPU/Mobo combo make sense? or is there a better AMD set up I could go with that's a little less power hungry than the intel set up? Also -- motherboard wise -- are they all much of a muchness?
